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Comment by gkhartman | Hacker News Reader

I was nodding along until I got to the $500/mo. service charge. I'd feel pretty good about $150/mo. or $200/mo., but I guess I'm not their target market since I have decent wired broadband. I was hoping that this would give Spectrum some competition in our area, but I'll have to wait a little longer.

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Starlink won't really ever be designed to compete with wired internet. There is limited bandwidth per satellite, and the density of most places that have good wired internet far exceeds what is reasonable on the current generation of satellites.

It's designed for people who are currently suffering on geostationary satellite internet, or some other low-bandwidth/high-latency setup.

Exactly. I'm typing this out over a first-gen Starlink connection, and the value is a lot better than most people realize. My other options include:

- 4g hotspot, 150ms latency, ~15gb/month, speeds of ~10-20mbps, costs $50 + $15/gb overage per month

- WISP network, 400ms latency, unlimited data at 500kbps-6mbps, ~95% uptime, costs $80/month

- HughesNet satellite, 600ms latency, 50gb/month, less than 10mb/s down, 90% uptime, $150/month

Or I could get Starlink with ~50ms of latency, unlimited data, ~100-150mbps down, 99% uptime at the fair price of $100 per month. Once you've lived away from broadband for long enough, you can bet everyone is fed up with the other 3 options.

With the spread of 5G mid and high band home internet service I wonder if that might not cover enough ground at some point to make it worthwhile. Verizon is actually selling it as unlimited internet for a decent price. I don't know about other carriers.

It certainly won't cover anything out where I live. Even if they did put up a 5G antennae, it would cover maybe 2 houses on my street if they placed it strategically.

you're getting better service than the others because they are not at capacity, and won't be until the chip shortage is over. enjoy it while you can, because speeds will get worse soon, and what you thought was a great service will be just like the rest.

*In countries with reasonably good wired internet

I live in Australia, a 30 minutes drive from the centre of a state capital and I've had a near 10x increase in my download speed and a 4x increase in my upload speed by moving to Starlink. I'm paying $40 AUD extra per month ($130 for Starlink, $90 for pleb tier wired) for the privilege. My wired link will not go any faster, 5G still isn't available at my house, and even if it was it's metered so borderline useless for a primary home link with a family watching Netflix, YouTube for kids, etc.

The regular dish is great for normal personal use already in remote areas (and the costs are very reasonable).

It’s not competitive in (most) areas with options from cable providers, but that’s also not its purpose.

Starlink will give us high speed low latency internet anywhere on earth, it moves the lower bound up to 150mbps with pretty low latency which is great.

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